gooseneck for ford ranger

[Will]

Originally Posted by Tractorman

Have fun driving 45 MPH down the interstate...and smashing it to the floor on hills and screaming at redline. Towing in at a gross of 10,700 pounds this summer with my truck was not fun power wise, try tossing another 2k on top of that. Essh.

Well, maybe. If you are towing a box of a trailer. I had that experience with my 4.0 Ranger towing an empty 14' enclosed trailer--as soon as I hit 45mph the wind was like hitting a wall.

My bus only has 185hp and it weighs 18,000# (25,500# gross) and sticks 10' up in the air and is 8' wide and runs 70mph down the road--rpm limited. A 4.0 can make 130hp at 3,000rpm so if you are geared to run 55mph at 3000rpm it is enough of an engine. You don't need 130hp on the flats, just on the hills. The problem is when you don't have the right gear to be in. You are being drug down in one gear, then hitting the rev limiter when you shift. These wide-ration transmission require that you do a good job of planning if you are going to set it up for towing. And I said the C5 was good because the loose 2.8 converter would be needed on the hills to kind of split the gears.

I posted a picture early in this thread about what I was planning to do. Right now I have a diesel crewcab and it has a gear splitter and I know how important havingthe right gear to be in is. I have full confidence I can set up my Ranger to tow 8,000#. I wouldn't be going cross country--I have a truck for that.

One thing about trailer brakes--they should be able to lock up. When I had a cheap time-delay controller I always had brake problems. I finally bought a Prodigy inertial controller and what a difference. A couple of years ago I had been down in Kentucky helping a member on here fix a road on his property and I had my little backhoe and skidloader on my trailer. I was coming back up I65 on the last leg and wanting to be home and running 80mph passing everyone and this car, whom I thought had decided wasn't going to make it so I put the hammer down to go past, suddenly changed his mind and came out right in front of me--then suddenly, in front of him, the entire highway decided to slam on their brakes. I stood on the brakes, knowing I was going to crash this guy because I had a 25mph advantage on him and he was getting into his brakes as well, and the trailer just jerked me right back like magic. With my old delay controller, that guy would be history, as would a few other cars. I drove pretty passively the rest of the way, sobered by the experiece. But the moral is, if your trailer brakes aren't good enough, fix them. Grooved drums, worn magnets, bad grounds, too-small wires. I've seen it all in various trailers. Crappy controller too.

I had a Casita, which is just like that Scamp. A 4.0 Ranger with 3.55 gears will pull that up most hills in OD without the cruise control popping off. We used an older Mazda B2600i with an auto for most of our ownership.